Harpers Magazine

How the CIA waged a silent war against Cuba

by Taylor Branch and George Crile III

During the last days of the Eitenhower Administration
the assassination of Fidel Castro presented itself as an
engaging possibility to various people in Washington who
had reason to mistrust a successful revolution so close to
the coast of Florida. Some of those people discussed the
possibility with the CIA , which had arranged sudden
changes of government in Guatemala and Iran , ar\d it has
been said that a few agents left for the Caribbean with
instructions to bring about a coup d’etat. Little more was
heard from them until the debacle at the Bay of Pigs.

The invasion , otherwise known as “the glorious march
on Havana had been sponsored by the Kennedy Admin-
istration, and the new President apparently perceived the
defeat as an affront to his pride. Within a matter of
weeks he committed the United States to a secret war
against Cuba that eventually required the services of
several thousand men and cost as much as' $100 million a
year. The war continued for four years. Kennedy entrust-
ed its direction to the CIA , which, depending on the testi-
mony of the witness telling the story, conducted an oper-
ation that could be described either as a large-scale ven-
detta or a small crusade. T he Agency launched a succession
of commando raids on the Cuban coast and encouraged
a number of assassins to make attempts on Castro’s life.
As late as 1964 the Agency* was landing weapons in Cuba
every week and sending up to fifty agents on missions to
destroy oil refineries , railroad bridges, and sugar mills.

The secret war failed in all of its objectives . Instead of
overthrowing Castro , it identified his revolution with the
1 cause of Cuban nationalism and forced him into alliance
with the Soviet Union. The way in which the war was
conducted, of necessity by means of stealth and criminal
violence, established unfortunate precedents. Always in
the name of a higher truth (more often than not the
defense of “free and democratic societies” against an
alien tyranny), a great many people in the American gov-
ernment were persuaded to violate their own laws, to tell
convenient lies, and to admire the methods of organized
crime. It is impossible to say whether these precedents
had anything to do with the history of the subsequent
decade. Certainly the news of assassination became com-

monplace, as did the discovery of official conspiracy and
concealment, and what began as another secret war in
Vietnam also came to depend upon a hit man’s body
count .

This article derives from the year-long investigations
of two contributing editors to Harper’s. Their forthcom-
ing book, which will contain the complete result of their
investigations, and which will be published by Harper’s
Magazine Press, deals with the experience of the men re-
cruited to fight the secret war in Cuba. Two of the prin-
cipal figures in the book, Bernard Barker and Rolando
Martinez, were employed by the CIA in 1961 as agents.
When they were arrested at Watergate in 1972, they still
thought of themselves as servants of the moral law.

The following narrative begins with the embarrassment
of the Kennedy Administration after the Bay of Pigs. □

m n Washington, President Kennedy struggled to coinpre-
| j hend how so total a disaster could have been produced by
LJ so many people who were supposed to know what they
were doing, who had w'recked governments other than Cas-
tro’s without mishap or detection. They had promised him
a secret success but delivered a public fiasco. Communist
rule in Cuba was to have been overthrown and Fidel Castro
executed by Cuban citizens, all without evidence of Ameri-
can involvement; instead. Castro was heaping scorn on the
“imperialist worms” he had defeated. Not only was the
invasion on abject military failure, but the highest officials
of the U.S. government were being subjected to worldwide
ridicule for having tried to pass it off ns the work of inde-
pendent Cubans. The CIA’s elaborate “cover story*’ had
fallen into absurdity, and the President finally ended the
charade by issuing a statement in which he assumed full
responsibility for die invasion. With this admission, the Bay
of Pigs became a virtual synonym for international humilia-
tion. as well as the most egregious display of official Ameri-
can lying yet entered into the public record.

In die United Stales, the sense of crisis was so intense that
it let loose the fear of war and rallied public opinion to the
President’s support. Kennedy had enough composure to take
advantage of the general nervousness and to seize the ofTcn-

49

THK KENNEDY VENDETTA

sive hy rattling the sword of patriotism. In his first major
speech after the Hay of Pips, Kennedy defined the issue not
ns covert American intervention in the affairs of another
country hut as Soviet penetration into the free world. The
United States had not struck against this foreign menace as
forcefully as it mi pi it have with American troops, lint, said
Kennedy: “Let the record show that our restraint is not in-
exhaustible.” The international principle of nonintervention
would not prevent the Linilcd States from .using military
force — alone, if necessary — to safeguard its freedom. And
“should that Lime ever come, we do not intend to he lectured
on intervention hy those whose character was stamped for
all time on the bloody streets of Budapest.” The President
called attention to u new and subtler battle of global ideolo-
gies — one taking place by subversion and manipulation
rather than by open clash of arms — and took up the chal-
lenge: “The complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies,
are about to be swept away by the debris of history,’* he
warned. “We dare not fail to see the insidious nature of
this new and deeper struggle. We dare not fail to grasp the
new concept, the new tools, l^e new sense of urgency we will
need to combat it, whether in Cuba or in South Vietnam.”

President Kennedy did in fact implement a new concept
of the Cold War struggle, but he did so in a disingenuous
way. After the Bay of Pigs, he summoned forth his much*
r admired charisma to present himself as a man who had
learned the hard lessons of history and who was deeply
suspicious of the CIA. Word seeped from the White House
into the newspapers that Kennedy had inherited the CIA’s
Cuban plan from the Eisenhower Administration, that’ he
never had put his heart in it, that he had been pressured
into action by Agency officials with a personal interest in
the scheme who coerced the young and inexperienced Pres-
ident before he even had time to redecorate the Oval Office.
The President was said to have grave doubts about advanc-
ing the cause of free, democratic societies by secret and
devious means. He was known to be seething With anger at
his advisers and especially at the CIA, which he told his
aides he would like to “splinter . . . into a thousand pieces
and scatter to the winds.” He demonstrated his displeasure
by establishing a commission, which included his brother
Robert, to investigate the Agency’s performance. Not long
afterward, CIA Director Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell,
architect of the plan for the Bay of Pigs, resigned. The Pres-
ident was said to have “throttled” the CIA.

But instead of “splintering” the Agency, the President
moved to control and strengthen it by assigning Robert Ken-
nedy to supervise its clandestine operations. The Attorney
General protected the President’s interest by forcing the
- CIA to adhere to the chief political lesson of the Bay of
Pigs — that clandestine operations should never expose Amer-
ican leaders to the risk of spectacular failure. Within this
restriction, the Kennedys placed more, not less, of the free
world’s defense in the hands of the CIA. Rather than shrivel-
ing up in the disgrace of its Cuban failure, the covert ac-
tion side of the Agency grew faster than it ever had before,
receiving a new lease on life and a new infusion of con-
fidence from the White House. And as far as Cuba was
concerned, this new American stance took the form of a vast
and unprecedented secret war against the Castro regime, de-
vised and launched by the Kennedy Administration through
the CIA.

OST ANYTHING THAT MIGHT IIIJUT Castro was proposed
and considered by the While House, and a stagger-
ing variety of measures were commissioned. They
ranged from an official economic embargo to covert com-
mando raids and acts of economic sabotage mounted against
Cuban targets by hundreds of agents throughout the world.
The overall objectives of Kennedy’s push against Cuba were
given such a high priority that virtually all agencies of the
federal government were enlisted. Representatives of the State
Department, Treasury, FBI, Commerce, Immigration, Cus-
toms were brought together in interdepartmental committees
to come up with measures that could damage Castro's Cuba.

Ray Cline, the deputy director of intelligence at the CIA
during those years, recalled, “ Both Jack and Bobby were
deeply ashamed after the Bay of Pigs, and they became quite
obsessed with the problem of Cuba. They were a couple of
Irishmen who felt they had muffed it, and they vented their
wrath on Castro for the next two years. And, being good
fighting Irishmen, they vented their wrath in all ways that
they could.”

Although responsibility for the secret war rested with
President Kennedy, it bore tbe stamp of his brother Rob-
ert. who entered into the Agency’s world with the passion
and commitment that led Joseph Kraft to describe the Rob-
ert Kennedy of the early 1960s as a “piano-wire hawk.”
Gen. Edward Lansdalc,* then the government’s foremost ex-
pert on unconventional warfare, served for a time as his
liaison man with the CIA. Lansdale says that both Kennedys
wanted “to bring Castro down. ... I feel certain that they
had that emotion in them until they were both killed. . . .
But Robby felt even more strongly about it than Jack. He
was protective of his brother, and he felt his brother had
been insulted at the Bay of Pigs. He felt the insult needed
to be redressed rather quickly.”

While the impetus and the authority for the secret war
came from the White House and the Justice Department, the
day-to-day conduct of the operations was assigned to Theo-
dore Shackley,** then one of the Agency’s most promising
young men. Shortly after the Bay of Pigs, the CIA brought
Shackley from Berlin to head a team charged with preparing
a “vulnerability and feasibility study” of the Castro regime.
He was just thirty-four years old at the time. Throughout
the remainder of 1961, while the Agency conducted holding
operations against Cuba and tried to rebuild its intelligence

• Lansdalc won great fame as the leader of the secret. and success-
ful, U.S. effort to help put down the Huk rebellion in ihe Philip-
pines during the 1950s, and his subsequent covert work in Vietnam
made him legendary as ihe model for both The Ugly American and
The Quiet American. One of Lansdale's proteges in the Philippine
campaign, Napoleon D. Valeriano, later became the first head of the
guerrilla instructors who trained anti-Castro Cubans for the Bay of
Pigs invasion. In Vietnam Lansdale became the inspiration tor a whole
generation of counterinsurgency experts, including Daniel Elhberg.

•• Today Shackley is one of the most powerful hierarchs in the CIA.
lie first made his mark with the Agency in the 1950s; in later years
he was the station chief in Laos when the CIA was beginning its
secret war there, then the station chief in Saigon. Later he was pro-
moted to head the Western Hemisphere Division of Clandestine Ser-
vices, and from that position he had overall responsibility for the
Agency’s efforts to overthrow the Allende regime in Chile. He was
also responsible for the Miami station and indirectly responsible for
Kolando Martinez on June 17, 1972, when the Hunt-Liddy team was
found in the Watergate offices of the Democratic party. A longtime
protege of CIA Director William Colby’s. Shackley is now chief of
(he Far Eastern Division of Clandestine Services.

50

network, Shackley and his colleagues shaped a plan to
exploit Castro’s weaknesses. And in February of 1962 lie
left for Miami to organize the secret war.

The secret command

small cia OFFICE had existed in Miami since the mid-
fl}\ 1950s as a routine outpost where a few aging agents
fivilinterviewed travelers returning from abroad. Scores of
agents had descended on Miami during the preparation for
the Bay of Pigs invasion, but they left soon after the dcbncle.
With the beginning of the secret war, a new station sprang
up to serve as the command post for all of the CIA’s world-
wide anti-Castro operations. Shackley’s arrival amounted to
a blank check from the Kennedy While House and the al-
ready large station quickly became the largest CIA station
in the world.

The station, known by its CIA code name as JM WAVE,*
was unique in the Agency’s hisloir. “It was a real anomaly,”
said Ray Cline. “It was run as ir it were in a foreign coun-
try, yet most of our agents were in the state of Florida.
People just overlooked the fact that it was a domestic oper-
ation.”

The station operated with an annual budget well in excess
of $50 million. It fielded a permanent staff of more than
300 American employees, mostly case officers, who, in turn,

• To the best of anyone’s knowledge, this, like all other CIA acro-

nyms, is meaningless.

employed and controlled a few thousand more Cuban agents.
The average JM WAVE case officer would he responsible for
between four and ten Cuban agents of intermediate stature —
known as “principal agents,” or “PAs” — and each PA would
be responsible for between ten and thirty regular agents. In
addition to the case officer-agent network, there were hun-
dreds of support people and American military officers un-
der contract to the Agency. The headquarters for JM WAVE
were located at the former Navy blimp center on the south
campus of the University of Miami. The cover name given
to the well-secured buildings was Zenith Technical Enter-
prises,** a front corporation, or “proprietary,” organized
by the CIA to conceal its operations. In addition to Zenith,
the Agency operated another fifty-four dummy corporations
— boat shops, real-estate firms, detective agencies, travel
companies, gun shops — as proprietary fronts to give cover
employment for the case officers and agents outside Zenith
headquarters. A former high official in the JM WAVE com-
mand described the size of the CIA presence in Florida:

“We had more than 100 vehicles under permanent lease for
the case officers. The lower-level types got Chevies and Plym-
oulhs, and the higher-ups got Pontiacs. Ted Shackley, the
station chief, drove a Cadillac. We had our own goddamn
gas station to supply that fleet of cars. There was a tremen-
dous logistics warehouse that included everything from
machine guns to caskets. Wc had our own medical staff,
our own polygraph teams, our own psychologists.

** In later years newspaper reports alleged that Zenith was a CIA
front. JM WAVE dealt with the inconvenience by changing the name
to Melmar.

51

THE KENNEDY VENDETTA

“Then we liad a couple of little airplanes, hundreds of
boats, safe houses all over the area and paramilitary bases
throughout the Florida Keys.

“There were several stalls in the station. One was subsi-
dizing just about everything in the exile community. If an
anti-Castro guy started up a weekly paper, we’d give him
some money and help him get the rag on the street. The end
result of this was that you had the whole community moni-
tored. We had another sta/T, a big one, that was debriefing
a couple of hundred Cuban refugees a day. There was a large
staff of analysts, and a technical stafT to read mail or send
letters in secret writing to contacts in Cuba, with instructions
for them to first spill lemon juice on them or run a hot
iron over the letter to get the writing to come out.”

Just as JM WAVE was the apex of a pyramid spreading
out over South Florida, it was also the center for the inter-
national coordination of the secret war. Every major CIA
station in the world had at least one case officer assigned .to
Cuban operations, reporting directly or indirectly to the
Miami station. In Europe, for example, all Cuban matters
were routed through a regional headquarters in the Frank-
furt station, which reported to JM WAVE. All Latin-Ameri-
can stations had Cuban specialists, with standing orders to
implement a three-pronged operational plan: (1) gather all
possible intelligence on Castro’s intentions and capabilities
in the country; (2) influence the host country to break
diplomatic and trade relations with Cuba; and (3) stimulate
anti-Castro propaganda in the host country.

JM WAVE wanted to know in advance about all travelers
in and out of Cuba so that the travelers could be asked for
information about Cuba, or so that their conversations could
be bugged if the person were knowledgeable enough. And if,
say, the Tokyo station reported that a high official of the
Castro government was preparing to visit Japan, JM WAVE
might send a Spanish-speaking case officer to Tokyo to make
a “recruitment pilch” to the official — i.e., to try to persuade,
bribe, or bladanail the official to defect and provide JM
WAVE with intelligence.

A strategy of sabotage

T he strategy of the secret war was based on the
conviction that the masses of the Cuban people didn’t
believe in Castro and would revolt if life became
sufficiently sour. As in all previous Cuban revolutions, the
chief tactical aim of the strategy was to promote disaffection
by sabotaging the Cuban economy.

In the overt aspect of the campaign, the United States
placed a total embargo on all trade with Cuba; it then
moved to persuade and, when necessary, to blackjack its
allies to join the embargo. For its part, the CIA worked
to hasten the decline of the Cuban economy by initialing
what Ray Cline described as “punitive economic sabotage
operations.” Years later the former CIA deputy director of
intelligence seemed to have second thoughts about those op-
erations: “Looking back on it, you might think all it accom-
plished was to make Castro beholden to the U.S.S.R., but
the CIA actively pursued this [policy]. We were sending
agents to Europe to get in touch with shippers to discourage
them from going to Cuba, and there were some actions to

sabotage cargoes — to contaminate them, tilings like that.”

One of the CIA officials who helped direct the worldwide
sabotage efforts offered this description of the Agency’s
efforts:

“There was a special technical staff in Langley [Virginia]
working on these problems. They were economically oriented
and they would come up with all kinds of grand plans for
disrupting the Cuban economy — everything from preventing
the Cubans from getting credit to figuring out how to disrupt
sugar sales. There was lots of sugar being sent out from
Cuba, and we were putting a lot of contaminants in it. We
would even open up boxes and chip off a gear lock on a
machine.

“There were all kinds of sabotage acts. We would have
our people pour invisible, untraceable chemicals into lubri-
cating fluids that were being shipped to Cuba. It was all
planned economic retrogression. Those fluids were going to
be used for diesel engines, and that meant the parts would
wear out faster than they could get replacements. Before we
sabotaged a product like that we would go to the manufac-
turer and see if we could convince him to do it; if that
wouldn’t work, then we would just put the science-fiction
crap in ourselves when the shipment was en route.

“We were really doing almost anything you could dream
up. One of our more sophisticated operations was convinc-
ing a ball-bearing manufacturer in Frankfurt, Germany, to
produce a shipment of ball bearings off center. Another was
to get a manufacturer to do the same with some balanced
wheel gears. You’re talking about big money when you ask
a manufacturer to go along with you on that kind of project
because he has to reset his whole mold. And he is probably
going to worry about the effect on future business. \ou
might have to pay him several hundred thousand dollars or
more.

“I know Jack Anderson wrote about us paying off a Japa-
nese freighter captain to ram a shipload of buses in the
Thames on its way to Cuba. Anderson claims it sunk them.
But I’m rather skeptical about that story — I would have
known about it if it were true. But it is true that we were
sabotaging the Leland buses going to Cuba from England,
and that was pretty sensitive business.”

ome OF THE sabotage operations were so minor that
the case officers considered them nothing more than
harassment. For example, the Agency helped wealthy
Cuban exiles file suit to seize Cuban property in compensa-
tion for their property in Cuba that had been confiscated
by Castro. As a result, a Cuban airplane landing in Mexico
City or Toronto might be attached and tied up in legal pro-
ceedings. Such impoundments rarely worked, but they tied
up some Cuban resources.

So did the commando raids. In the summer of 1961, JM
WAVE began running paramilitary missions against targets
inside Cuba — small ones at first, and then larger ones, such
as sugar mills and oil refineries. These raids damaged the
Cuban economy directly, and they also forced Castro to
divert money and manpower into coastal defenses. In 1961
he had 200,000 men under arms, plus a large administrative
bureaucracy and a whole industry at work on civil-defense
installations. For JM WAVE, the commando raids required
huge expenditures for boats, weapons, secret naval bases

52

along the Florida Keys, logistics support, training facilities,
and salaries for the Cuban commandos and their command-
ers. The Agency had to maintain a clandestine navy — in
which Rolando Martinez was one of its most efficient boat
captains — as well as a paramilitary army.

It was an enormous task for JM WAVE to hide its vast
apparatus for the secret war. Since most of its agents and
assets were in Florida, there was no American Embassy to
provide the official cover or the diplomatic immunity under
which the Agency normally works. One problem wjth run-
ning a secret war out of a CIA station in an American city is
that the very nature of the work constantly forces violations
of local, state, and federal laws. All the boat missions to Cuba
were technically illegal under the Neutrality Act, the mar-
itime laws, and immigration statutes, so the station had to
work out special arrangements with Customs, Immigration,
and the Coast Guard. It was illegal 'for agents to drive
around with machine guns and plastic explosives in their
cars, as they often did, and the station had to establish liai-
son with seventeen police jurisdictions down the Florida
coast and into the Keys. The result was that any agent who
.was arrested for anything from drunken driving to illegal
possession of firearms would be quickly released. It was of-
ten illegal for case officers and agents to file corporate pa-
pers, bank statements, and income-tax returns using cover
names and false sources of income. This required the co-
operation of judges, the Justice Department, the Internal
Revenue Service, and numerous local institutions in Florida.

Perhaps only in a city like Miami could the clandestine
empire of JM WAVE escape public attention. In the early
years of the secret war, Miami already resembled wartime
Casablanca. It swarmed with spies, counterspies, exiled dic-

tators. Mafia executives, refugees, entertainers, countesses,
smugglers, gamblers, fortune-tellers, gun runners, soldiers
of fortune, fugitives, and loudly dressed tourists — many pur-
suing possibly criminal ends against the garish backdrop of
Miami Bench. Nothing seemed to stand out in the crowd,
and that helped the CIA protect its rover. So did the be-
wildering variety of anti-Castro movements, most of which
had been transplanted north to Florida — with names like
Monticristi, the 4th of November, Alpha 66. the Revolution-
ary Student Directorate, the Movement of Revolutionary Re-
covery, the 30th of May — and dozens of small groups that
consisted only of a leader and a few ardent followers.

But not even in Miami could JM WAVE have survived
without the full-scale collaboration of virtually every signifi-
cant sector of the city’s community — with newspapers, civic
organizations, and political leaders. In effect, they all had to
join the conspiracy. For example, every time an agent went
to get a driver’s license or a passport, he would perjure
himself; but as one former JM WAVE official observed:
“We all were perjuring ourselves all the lime. All of the
Cubans regularly provided erroneous information to federal
agencies at the CIA’s direction. The same was true when they
went to take out bank loans. We set up relations with the
banks because we had to give them phony information.”

The same relations applied to the news media. As the
former agent went on to explain: “We didn’t have any
trouble with the Miami papers. A paper like the Miami
Herald would have one or two reporters with jurisdiction
for Cuba, and we would give them access to the station. So
we would feed them information and give them a career out
of handouts. The guys learn hot to hurt you. Only occasion-
ally do you give them a big lie, and then only for a good

53

L

THK KENNEDY VENDETTA

reason. The paper was always willing lo keep lliitigs quiet

for us.

“The problems keeping a cover were endless, hut you had
to do all of this simply lo Hear the way for your operational
officers to he able lo work without interruption.'*

Cuban recruits

KTj ME ACENCY HAD LITTLE TROUBLE recruiting Cubans to

I J risk their lives in the secret war. For although the

** CIA had recently sent many of the exile community to
death or imprisonment in the Bay of Pigs invasion, there
were still numerous Cuban agents and new volunteers who
believed that Castro could be overthrown only with the as-
sistance of tiie United States. There were bankers, doctors,
and businessmen among the Cuban agents of JM WAVE, as
well as laborers and lifelong revolutionaries, and they - all
welcomed another chance to strike out at Castro. The Agency
gave them the best training available, transporting them to
it9 bases in Central America and elsewhere for lessons -in ex-
plosives, weapons, survival, ambushes, logistics, and com-
munications.

Although Rolando Martinez was in many ways typical of
the Agency's Cuban volunteers, he was more accomplished
and experienced than most. When he surfaced in 1972 as
one of the Cuban-Amcricans captured in the Watergate
break-in, Martinez was still on the CIA payroll and had 354
missions to Cuba recorded in Agency files. As a boat cap-
tain in the clandestine navy of JM WAVE, he completed
fifty missions before the Bay of Pigs and would complete
some seventy-five more during the first two years of the
secret war.

The main difference in the paramilitary raids after
the Bay of Pigs was that the American supervisors often
accompanied their Cuban agents to Cuba. The men dressed
in green fatigues, like those worn by Castro’s militia, and
they carried machine guns with silencers, recoilless rifles,
and C-4, the plastic explosive. Their secret bases ranged
from lavish estates with indoor swimming pools and tennis
courts in Coral Gables to remote compounds in the Keys.
In his early missions after the Bay of Pigs. Martinez's cargo
usually consisted of weapons for the underground's caches
or agents to be infiltrated into Cuba; a modest infiltration
could involve as many as sixty CIA agents.

All of these operations were carried out with extraordi-
nary attention to detail. Briefings covered everything from
analyses of the latest U-2 photographs of the target area to
weather reports giving the exact time the sun would rise and
set on the Cuban coast. All operational plans were mapped
out to account for ever)' minute of the landings, and there
were contingency plans for possible disasters. If captured,
Martinez was instructed to say he was on a maritime re-
search project and that the information he was gathering
was of a privileged nature. Like the other Cuban agents, he
carried Cuban money and false papers.

Sometimes Martinez captained his boat all the way from
Florida to Cuba, but usually a large mother ship would tow
him to within fifty miles of the coast, fie would then take
the commando team close lo the shore in his “intermediary”
craft, and from a distance of a feiv hundred yards tiie

agents landed in RB-12 rubber lifeboats, which had special
electric motors fitted with silencers. Once they had landed,
Martinez communicated with them with a high-powered
walkie-talkie. lie carried his own rccoilless rifle, and in
some instances he provided fire support for the men when
they met resistance on land or when a Castro gunboat pur-
sued them. More than once, he was given personal charge
of weapons drops, in which special rifles with silencers and
telescopic sights were left in designated inland spots. As
always, there were some special twists to CIA secrecy: some
of the men being infiltrated into Cuba wore hoods on the
whole trip so that the boat crews would not see their faces.

T HE MISSIONS BECAME more ambitious in the late sum-
mer months of 1961, and in the following years Mar-
tinez found himself working in large-scale raids aimed
at blowing up oil refineries and chemical plants. Sometimes
Martinez would drop off a team and come back several days
later to pick them up; at other times the team would stay
in Cuba for several weeks or months. The pickups — or. in
Agency parlance, “exfiltralion” missions — were the most
nerve-wracking assignments: there was always the chance
that the agents had been captured and forced to reveal the
time and place of their rendezvous, in which event a trap
would be waiting for the boat crew. The worst moments
came during the long waits for the agents who never
arrived. Aboard ship on their way back to Florida, the
commandos W'ould clean their weapons and talk of the tar-
gets they had hit and the Castro militiamen they had killed.

There were missions to Cuba almost every week, and the
Cuban agents had to trust entirely to the power and good
intentions of the CIA. They didn't know' the last names of
their case officers; as a rule, they didn't even know if the
agents’ first names were noms de guerre. Everything about
the Company was shrouded in mystery. The principle of
“compartmentation," or keeping information in strictly lim-
ited compartments, was drilled into all employees. To make
sure that no one talked or listened outside his compartment,
the Agency employed hundreds of Cuban agents to watch
other Cuban agents, and they, in turn, were checked, as was
everyone else, including the American case officers, by peri-
odic polygraph tests.

All these security precautions tended to leave the Cubans
with little overall knowledge of what the Company was
doing, although everyone knew' that die JM WAVE station
somehow’ could violate the laws of the land at will. There
would be times when an agent would get drunk and be
thrown in jail. Their case officers could always get them out
without any questions. Agents could get divorces without
having to go into open court, and they could earn* all kinds
of guns around. Many times the Coast Guard would stop
their boats on the way to Cuba, and the captain merely had
to say a code word to be waved on. The extralegal powers of
the Company added to the agents’ dependence on their case
officers, which, as Martinez recalls, was a strong one:

“Let me tell you what it was really like. Your CO was for
you like the priest. You had to rely on him. because he was
the one who could solve your problems. You learned to tell
him everything, your complete life. The important thing was
that you knew they would take care of you. and you knew
they would take care of your family if you were captured

56

or killed on a mission. They supported all the families of
the Brigade members, and they did the same for the families
of the men who were lost on our operations. They arc still

supporting them. . .

“Once a Castro gunboat came after my boat on a mission
off the north coast of Cuba, and I radioed for help. Before
we could even decode the return message from the base, I
looked up, and there were two Phantom jets and a Neptune
flying over us. It’s a trademark of the American forces in
general. You have seen how in Vietnam if a helicopter goes
down, ten other helicopters will fly in to get the pilot out.
That was the same spirit that prevailed in our operations. I
still believe today that the Company might be able to do
something for me about the Watergate someday.’

The cowboys of JM WAVE

ry NOTHER KIND OF VOLUNTEER prominent in the secret
M\ war was perhaps best exemplified by the late William
Zr\A (Rip) Robertson. Robcrtsfcn represented a special
breed of CIA operative— men with names like Boy Scout
and Rudy and Mike — who led the military side of the secret
war. They were not case officers — die bureaucrats and diplo-
mats who comprise the Agency’s permanent staff. Instead,
they were independent specialists under renewable contract
to the CIA, known as “paramilitaries,” “PMs,” or “cow-

boys.” Ray Cline explained their role in die Agency’s work:
“You need to understand the national consensus of the 1950s
and ’60s, when we believed the world was a tough place
filled with actual threats of subversion by other countries.
The Russians had cowboys around everywhere, and that
meant we had to get ourselves a lot of cowboys if we wanted
to play the game. You’ve got to have cowboys— the only
thing is you don’t let them make policy. You keep them in
the ranch house when you don’t have a specific project for

them.” t f

At the time of his arrival in Miami in the summer ot
1961, Robertson already bad become a figure of romance.
He bad fought behind the lines in Korea for the CIA, and
he had endeared himself to the CIA’s Cuban agents by his
performance at the Bay of Pigs. Despite President Kennedy s
orders that no Americans land in the invasion, RoberLson
was the first man ashore on one of the beaches. Later, when
Castro’s forces started routing the invaders, he went back
irt voluntarily to rescue survivors. In Washington, during
the investigation into the CIA’s handling of the invasion,
Robertson appeared as a witness and talked at length with
Robert Kennedy. He told his Cuban commandos that Ken-
nedy was all right, which they took as a high compliment,
sinoe Robertson hated all politicians.

Rip Robertson was close to fifty by the time he started
running paramilitary operations against Castro. He was a
big man, about six foot two, with a perpetual slouch and
wrinkled clothes. Everything about him was unconventional.

<?■

rrj * ■ :

Li — . . / - thr CIA's secret navy in 1959. Later, he supplied larger craft t

The Keefer, the fint boat Martinez captained a/ter joining the LlA s secret navy

>

57

t

THE KENNEDY VENDETTA

lie wore n baseball cap and glasses lied behind bis bead
with a siring, and always bad a pulp novel stuffed in bis
back pocket. From ibe military point of view, nothing looked
right about his appearance, but to the Cubans be was an
idol who represented the best part of the American spirit
and the hope of the secret war. Ramon Orozco, one of his
commandos, remembers what the paramilitary operations
were like:

“After the Bay of Pigs is when the great heroic deeds of
Rip really began. I was on one of his tea'ms, hut he con-
trolled many teams and many operations. And everything
was good through 1963. Our team made more than seven
big war missions. Some of them were huge: the attacks on
the Texaco refinery, the Russian ships in Oriente Province,
a big lumberyard, the Patrice Lumumba sulfuric acid plant
at Santa Lucia, and the diesel plant at Casilda. But they
never let us fight as much as w'e wanted to, and most of the
operations were infiltrations and weapons drops. ;

“We would go on missions to Cuba almost every week.
When wc didn’t go, Rip would feel sick and get very mad.
He was always blowing off his steam, but then he would
call us his boys, and be tvould hug us and hit us in the
stomach. He was always trying to crank us up for the mis-
sions. Once he told me, ‘I'll give you SoO if you bring me
back an car.’ I brought him two, and he laughed and said,
‘You’re crazy,’ but he paid me S100, and he took us to his
house for a turkey dinner. Rip was a patriot, an American
patriot. Really, I think he was a fanatic. He’d fight anything
that came against democracy. He fought with the Company
in Korea, in Cuba, and then he went to Vietnam. He never
stopped, but he also went to church and he practiced
democracy.”

At the end of December, 1961, Orozco went on a ten-day
operation with a seven-man team. The commandos blew up
a railroad bridge and watched a train run off the ruptured
tracks. Then they burned down a sugar warehouse, and on
Christmas Day, with a detachment of militia apparently in
pursuit, Lhey sought to escape in their rubber boat to an
intermediary ship on which Rip and Martinez waited for
them. By this time, the American officers were not supposed
to be going into Cuban waters, much less to the shore, and
Rip had already been reprimanded for his previous adven-
tures. Nevertheless, when his commandos missed their first
rendezvous, Rip loaded a rubber boat with rockets and re-
coilless rifles, ordered another commando, Nestor Izquierdo,
to get in with him, and then motored up and down the coast
looking for signs of his men. He was back on Martinez s
ship when Orozco called him from the shore.

“We had a problem with the motor when we finally got
in the boat. 1 had just shot some guy with an M-3 silencer,
and we had to get out, so we radioed Rip with the distress
signal: ’Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh.’ Well, Rip came right into
the bay. When we saw him, w'e said, ’That is the old man
for you.’ We called him the old man. And then he called
out, ‘Come on, my hoys!’ Later he told me why he had to
come in for us. *1 couldn’t lose the crazy guy, he said. He
always called me the crazy guy.”

Despite orders, Rip continued to go on operations with
his commandos. His superiors became so angry that they
resorted to ordering the Cuban boat captains not to allow
him to hoard the intermediary ships that took the teams to
die shore. One of the boat captains from those days, now a

Washington lawyer, recalled the futility of this restraint:

“Rip was not supposed to get on the intermediary boat —
’not under any conditions.’ One lime, he was on my mother
ship, and his hoys were about to go on an operation. Rip
said he felt sick, very sick, and then he goes down in the
ship as if he is going to lie down. I he next minute there is
Rip with his face all black with charcoal, and he is wear-
ing the uniform of the commandos — the hat and everything
— and he is all slouched down in the boat in the middle of
the men pretending he is not Rip. People knew it was him,
hut what could we do?

“I loved Rip, hut oh, my God! He was not the kind of
man you want as your enemy. If the United States had just
200 Rips, it wouldn’t have any problems in the world. He
loved war, but it was very difficult for him to adjust to the
kind of warfare we were making. He wanted an open war,
and we were waging a silent one.’’

y NDER THE best OF CIRCUMSTANCES, the paramilitaries
were a hard group to control, but the problem was
particularly intense during the secret war because
they came to identify so closely with their Cuban agents
and with the cause of wresting Cuba from Castro, whom
, they saw as a simple tool of the Russians. They weie crea-
tures of the Cold War, responding to the new call from the
tough young President who was not about to tolerate a Com-
munist menace just ninety miles from Florida. It was a
time of high winds and strong feelings in politics. As^ the
case officer who worked with Robertson remarked: It s

almost impossible today to put yourself back in those times
when idealism ran so high, and we felt we were on a cru-
sade against evil, but that was what we felt.

“People think of the CIA’s paramilitary officers as thugs.
But you would he amazed to meet them. In Miami there was
every conceivable kind of person represented in the para-
military units. Some had Ph.D.s, and some had gone to Ivy
League schools. There were a few who had lots of money,
and of course there were some adventurer types. All of them
were very emotional about their work. I ve seen lots of
them cry at their failures, and there were many failures be-
cause of the high casualties on these operations.”

The difficulties of control were so great that the Agency
often didn’t know which missions were leaving in which
directions. The various Cuban movements often wanted in-
dependent raids to build their stature and reputation among
the anti-Castro Cubans. Some wanted to impress the Com-
pany with their skills in the hope of obtaining jobs and fi-
nancial support, while oLhers went on their own in order to
escape CIA restrictions and control. JM WAVE gave some
of these raids the green light of encouragement, some the
yellow light of toleration, and others the red light of dis-
approval— in which event the FBI or Immigration or the
Coast Guard would be alerted to enforce the law'.

The confused maze of anti-Castro activity in South Flor-
ida during the secret war included everything from officially
organized, elaborate CIA teams to impromptu groups of
zealous students seeking to make a name for themselves. This
vagueness was well suited to the purposes of JM WAVE. To
the extent that an attack on Cuba was independent, it cut
down on the station’s enormous budget. And the existence of
the independent movements helped mask the station’s own

58

TIIF, KENNEDY VENDETTA

activities: even nn official CIA commando raid could be
passed ofT as the work of uncontrollable Cuban groups. The
Cuban agents themselves would not know the status of a
raid carried out by people outside their compartment, and
there would lie endless speculation in Miami about how
much support llic Company had given a commando raid here
or an ofTshore mortar shelling there. Newspaper reports —
“Alpha 66 Hits Castro Sugar Mill” — settled nothing, of
course, for the agents knew they could mean anything.

Perhaps the most famous of the quasi-independent at*
tacks look place on August 24, 1962, when six young Cu-
bans piloted a boat to within 200 yards of the shore near
Havana and shelled the Blanquila Hotel. All six of the com-
mandos had been trained by the Company and worked for
both JM WAVE and for the Revolutionary Student Direc-
torate. The boat they used, a thirty-one-foot Bertram named
the Juwtin, belonged to the Directorate, as did the weapons
for the attack — a recoilless rifle, two fifty-caliber machine
guns, and a twenty-millimeter cannon, all purchased from
Mafia gun dealers in Miami. The idea for the Bianquita Ho-
tel attack originated shortly after one of the commandos,
Carlos (“Batea”) HernarWcz, returned from an official JM
WAVE mission to disrupt that year's International Socialist
Youth Conference in Helsinki. When Batea landed at Miami
Airport, one of his friends in the Directorate met him with
word that an underworld contact was offering a twenty-
millimeter cannon for sale at a bargain price of S300. Batea
bought the cannon, and planned an attack based on intelli-
gence that Czech and Russian military advisers, then coming
into Cuba in large numbers, gathered for parties every Fri-
day night at the Blanquila.

The Juanin sailed into the harbor at Miramar, a suburb
of Havana, and got so close that Batea remembers seeing
the lights in the ballroom and the uniforms of the soldiers.
His companions opened up with a five-miriute barrage at
point-blank range, inflicting heavy damages on the hotel be-
fore returning to Miami at reckless speed.

Castro denounced the Bianquita attack so loudly that it
was banner news in the world press. The Justice Department
announced that the perpetrators of the attack had been iden-
tified, and that further acts of that nature would be pros-
ecuted as violations of the Neutrality Act. JM WAVE an-
nounced nothing.

The semantics of assassination

UR1NC THE EARLY years of the secret war, the author-
ization for the overall policies and for potentially em-
barrassing operations emanated from the 303 Com-
miltee (now known as the 40 Committee), through which
the President controlled missions related to national secu-
rity. Many of the men who sat on those committees now
acknowledge that the commando raids and sabotage oper-
ations were approved at the highest levels of the U.S. gov-
ernment, but it is bard to find anyone who remembers sup-
porting them. Marine Gen. Victor (“Brute”) Krulak and
his assistant, Col. Jack L. Hawkins, were in charge of co-
ordinating the Pentagon's counterinsurgency forces. Krulak
sat on the committee that authorized the Cuban raids, and
Hawkins represented him on a lower-level committee that

met to consider other nets of sabotage against Cuban tar-
gets. Both of them say they were skeptical of the tactics at
best. “The object in Cuba was not to put down an insur-
gency,” said Hawkins, “but to develop one. ...The work
was done by the Agency. I remember them blowing up a
refinery and making efforts to burn up sugar fields — things
like that — but none of them was very successful. I don’t
know why they were doing it. What happens in these things
is that the bureaucrats fall in love with their operations,
and rational thought just flics out the window.”

Gen. Maxwell Taylor, President Kennedy’s chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, offered the staunchest defense
of the paramilitary side of the secret war. “Just bear in
mind, he said recently, “that this was a period of general
frustration after the Bay of Pigs over what to do about
Castro. After all, Castro was setting up training facilities
and inviting Latin-American Communists to come to Cuba
to learn how to spread the revolution, and there w f ere a hell
of a lot of those people. When you have an unpleasant
neighbor who is kicking you in the shins, you ask yourself,
‘Can’t I just retaliate a hit and remind him that we’re still
around?* They [the raids] weren’t completely rash, how-
ever. Otherwise we would have discouraged them. But in a
strategic sense they weren’t anything more than just pin-
pricks.”

CIA officials now admit disarmingly that the pinpricks
were part of the general strategy of the secret war, but they
point out that they were merely following the directives
set forth by the White House. And insofar as Cuban oper-
ations were concerned, the White House tended to mean
Robert F. Kennedy. Both Krulak and Hawkins saw him as
the moving force behind the policy, as did Under Secretary
of State George Ball. “Bobby was always for that kind of
thing,” Ball said. “He always used to go to the 303 Com-
mittee; he was fascinated by all that covert stuff, counter-
insurgency and all the garbage that went with it.”

jJ HERE WAS A CERTAIN CHARM about the way in which

d Robert Kennedy pursued his enemies. His infectious
idealism transformed the dry world of government
memos into a crusade against the devil, whether it were
James Hoffa, organized crime, Fidel Castro, or the Vietnam
war. Like Nixon, he was ruthless. But, unlike Nixon, he was
convinced that the world would be on his side. The word
most bandied about inside the Kennedy Administration was
tough, while outside everyone spoke of Camclot.

Kennedy and the CIA waged a secret war against Castro
partly out of the combatants’ vindictiveness and partly out
of a commitment to the democratic crusade. “I remember
that period so vividly,” said Ray Cline. “We were so wrapped
up in what the President wanted. Bobby was a 9 emotional
as he could be [about Cuba], and he always talked like he
was the President, and he really was in a way. He was al-
ways bugging the Agency about the Cubans. I don’t doubt
that talk of assassinating Castro was part of Bobby’s dis-
cussion with some Agency people.”

There were a number of high-level discussions about as-
sassinating Castro, even before the Cuban missile crisis,
mostly arising out of frustration with Castro’s success as a
Cold War adversary. It was an era when, as former national
security adviser McGeorge Bundy recently remarked, “We

60

I

The secret war surfaces

used to sit around llie While House all the lime thinking
how nice it would he if such and such a leader did not exist.”
General Lansdale says that he chaired one meeting at which
an assassination proposal was made. Richard Goodwin, who
chaired a White House task force on Cuba, said that at one
of the meetings Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ad-
vocated killing Castro. “I was surprised and appalled to
hear McNamara propose this," said Goodwin. “It was at the
close of a Cuba task force session, and he said thal Castro’s
assassination was the only productive way of dealing with
Cuba.” Goodwin believes that Robert Kennedy might have
stimulated such methods only indirectly, perhaps unaware
of the knight’s compulsion to fulfill the king’s every wish:
“To the extent that Bobby was involved in anything, it would
have been like Henry II asking rhetorically, ‘Who will free
me of this turbulent priest?’ and then the zealots going
out and doing it.”

HETHEK OR NOT THE zealots received direct orders
from the President or Ajtorney General, they did
receive orders to eliminate Castro from power in
I Cuba. The secret war was the result of that policy, and
Castro’s assassination, if not specified, was a logical objec-
tive of that war. Acting on the President’s authority, JM
WAVE trained several thousand Cubans in guerrilla tac-
tics, armed them with weapons and explosives, and sent
them down to the Caribbean with hopes of glory. All of them
sought to end Castro’s hold on Cuba, and many of them
made their own attempts on Castro’s life, in the impromptu
tradition of the attack on the Blanquita Hotel. By the end of
1961, several men affiliated with the CIA had already been
foiled in attempts to kill him, among them LuisToroella (ex-
ecuted), Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo (still imprisoned), William
Morgan (executed), and Antonio Veciana (escaped to the
United States). Had these men succeeded, their efforts would
have been tied to the U.S. only indirectly, if at all. Certain-
ly their failures did not cause the embarrassments of the
Bay of Pigs, and even a successful assassination by any
! one of them would have been impossible to trace to the
* Oval Office.

To the CIA’s Cuban agents who fought in the secret war
the search for proof of officially sanctioned plots seems
somewhat absurd. Martinez described it as largely a ques-
tion of semantics: “There was an attempt by this country
to overthrow Castro, and it was not to be by elections,’* he
says. “It was to be by war. The papers now want to say
there were plots. Well, I can tell you there were plots. I
took a lot of weapons to Cuba. Some of them were very
special weapons for special purposes. They were powerful
rifles with sophisticated scopes — Springfields with bolt ac-
tions, rifles only used by snipers. They were not sent to
shoot pigeons or kill rabbits. Everyone in the underground
was plotting to kill Castro, and the CIA was helping the un-
derground. I was with the underground, as well as with the
CIA, so you could say I was involved in the plots, too. but
that is all so obvious.”

Ray Cline made a similar point: “I’m almost positive that
there was no serious CIA -controlled effort to assassinate
anybody,” he said, “but I think the intention of some in-
filtration teams was to do it. It was the spirit of lots of
Cubans and lots of the CIA case officers.”

N AUGUST OF 1961. just as the secret war was beginning
fj to take shape. White House adviser Richard Goodwin
M found himself at a party in Uruguay with Ernesto (Che)
Guevara. The chance encounter led to a conversation which
seemed to sum up the contradictions inherent in all of the
American efforts to overthrow Castro.

Guevara began by asking Goodwin to thank Kennedy for
the Bay of Pigs invasion. Before then, he said, Castro had
held a tenuous grip on the Cuban revolution, with the econ-
omy in chaos and numerous internal factions plotting against
him. But the invasion, Guevara said jovially, had assured
Castro’s hold on the country. It had made him even more
of a hero, as the man who had defended Cuba against the
greatest power in the world. Goodwin, by his own account,
acknowledged the backhanded compliment and asked Gue-
vara to return the favor by invading the U.S. Naval Base
at Guantanamo, Cuba. This would give Kennedy a pretext
for openly using America’s overwhelming military force,
releasing him from the clandestine restrictions of the secret
war. Guevara smiled and said that Castro would never be
so stupid.

Neither Castro nor John Kennedy was politically stupid,
but they acted against each other in an atmosphere of mu-
tual paranoia and vengeance that eventually came to the
world’s attention as the Cuban missile crisis. To Fidel Cas-
tro, who was attempting to become the first Cuban leader
in history with a power Base independent of the United
States, Kennedy was a necessary but dangerous enemy. In
a sense, Castro needed both the Bay of Pigs and the secret
war to help him turn Cuba’s revolutionary tradition into
a war of independence against the United States, and he
made constant speeches to his people about the new Amer-
ican threat. “Imperialism was shocked by the Bay of Pigs,”
he said, “but now they are at it again. Their strategy in-
cludes forming mercenary groups, sabotage groups, fifth
columnists, terrorists, and bands of counterrevolutionaries.”
While Castro found U.S. hostility helpful to the task of main-
taining national unity within Cuba, he was uncertain of
Kennedy’s intentions, and he knew that the very survival
of his regime depended upon his holding the balance be-
tween useful little wars and a fatal big one.

By the summer of 1962 the economic warfare hod a real
effect on Castro, more than offsetting the political gain he
had achieved within Cuba. The Cuban economy was de-
teriorating and had become more dependent on the Soviet
Union than it had been on the United States. In addition,
the people were afraid that the commando raids and para-
military missions prefigured a new invasion. Castro had
triumphed at the Bay of Pigs, but, sooner or later, his luck
w r ould run out. Castro turned to the Soviet Union for mili-
tary protection as well as for economic support, and he
began receiving Russian missiles in the summer. For all
practical purposes, it was an act tantamount to invading
Guantanamo, and so Castro tried to do it secretly.

From President Kennedy’s perspective, the events of niid-
1962 were as alarming and fateful as they were to Castro.
Signs of the Communist advance fdlcd the news. Castro
loudly proclaimed his goal of spreading the revolution across
Latin America, and at the same time the number of new

J

61

t

TIIF, KKWMCDY VENDETTA

refugees from Communist Cuba remained constant at about
3,000 u week. Some came on tbc Pan American flights from
Havana, some on commandeered yachts, and others on home-
made life rafts. All of them brought horror stories about
life under the Cuban dictatorship and only those personal
possessions they could carry in a single suitcase. When the
refugees landed at Opa-Locka Air Force Base, where the
CIA maintained a massive debriefing facility, at least one
of them would bend down and kiss the earth. In the de-
briefing sessions, many of the refugees told of the grow-
ing Russian presence in Cuba, which was not difficult
to see. By the fall, there were 20,000 Russian soldiers and
teams of Russian laborers there, working secretly to assem-
ble the nuclear missiles. This word filtered up through the
CIA to President Kennedy, for whom the Russian presence
carried the electric political meaning of the Berlin Wall.

N October 15, the day Kennedy was told that U-2
photographs confirmed the existence of Russian mis-
siles in Cuba, Maifinez and his boat crew were called
to their base at Summer Land Key and told that they would
leave immediately on a mission. For several months, they
had been preparing for one of their biggest operations — the
destruction of the Matahambre copper mines in Pinar del
Rio Province. The ore from the mines, which accounted
for 1 percent of Cuba’s gross national product, was carried
to the port of Santa Lucia along a twelve-kilometer elevated
cable-car system, supported by giant towers. CIA planners
had determined that production could be halted for a full
year if the towers were knocked out.

Twice before, JM WAVE had sent teams to Cuba to blow
up the mines. The first time, in late 1961, two of the Amer-
ican paramilitary commanders had gone along to direct the
operation. In preparation for the mission, CIA technicians
constructed a full-scale model of one of the cable-car towers,
and the commandos practiced their demolition tactics for
weeks. Everything appeared to have been taken into account.
But halfway to Cuba the ship’s motor conked out, the radio
Battery went dead, and the team was left floating helpless-
ly in the Caribbean.

The mission was typical of many CIA operations — every-
thing would be planned down to the last second, and then
some quirk or accident would throw the mission awry. In
the summer of 1962 Martinez took the commandos back for
a second try, but the team met a patrol of Castro militia
and retreated to the ships.

As the agents listened to the October 15 briefing, they real-
ized that there was a special urgency attached to the mis-
sion. “You do it,” they were told, “or don’t bother to come
back alive.” The next day, Martinez, his boat crew, and the
eight commandos left base on the Agency’s 150-foot moth-
er ship. By the time they left the mother ship for Martinez’s
intermediary boat on the night of October 18. one of the
largest amphibious invasion forces since World War II was
beginning to assemble in Florida and neighboring states.
The Army s 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions were or-
dered ready for immediate deployment, and 40,000 Marines
stood ready as part of an amphibious task force in the Ca-
ribbean, with another 5,000 Marines on alert at Guanta-
namo. In all, the Army gathered 100,000 troops in the
southern United States.

HEN THE COMMANDOS LANDED on the roa>t of Pinar
del Rio Province, they split up to set the C-4 charges
around the cablc-rar towers. Before they could do
so, some* of them were seen by a Cuban patrol, and Martinez
saw militia search flares light up the night skies. He waited
in his boat near the shore, and six of the commandos made
it out to him after a brief fire fight. Martinez waited an
hour for the other two to return, and then went out to sea.
He returned the next night, and again the night after that.

On October 22, Martinez took the boat in close to shore
at dusk, with an infrared light serving as a beacon for the
two lost commandos. The boat was within shouting range
of the coast when the radio operator said that the President
was about to make an address to the nation. The men turned
the radio on low, expecting Kennedy to announce a new
crisis in Berlin or a new stance on rising steel prices. In-
stead, the subject was Cuba, and the President was saying
everything the Cubans wanted to hear about the Russians
and the missiles and the need for the United States to act.
It was all too much for the ship’s navigator, who grabbed
the radio and put it on full volume. “He was so happy,”
Martinez later recalled, “that he didn’t care if anyone could
hear the speech from the coast. We had to make him turn
it down.”

Back at the base, Martinez was approached by a high-
ranking JM WAVE official who said the U.S. was about to
invade Cuba and asked Martinez if he would be willing to
parachute into Pinar del Rio, his old province, in advance of
the American tropps. Hundreds of the CIA’s other Cuban
agents were ordered to stand by for landings in which they
would mark the beaches and serve as guides for paratroop
units.

A second wave

n HEN the CRISIS PASSED and most of the world felt
\ ' j \ y relieved to have survived it, the Cuban agents were
« w disappointed but not despairing. They believed that
Kennedy, having stared “eyeball to eyeball” at Nikita
Khrushchev and won, had acquired renewed confidence in
his capacity to overthrow Castro. They felt the momentum
swinging their way, and their spirits were buoyed still
higher when they learned that Kennedy was pressing his ad-
vantage in the negotiations for the release of the 1.179 Bay
of Pigs survivors still in Cuban jails. Castro’s ransom price
was £53 million in drugs, medical supplies, and cash. “Both
of the Kennedys felt a real sense of obligation to get those
people out of jail,” said Ray Cline. “They fell guilty and
ashamed in the face of the refugees still down there in Dade
County: they couldn’t stay away from them, but they also
couldn t face them. Both of them, particularly Bobby, spent
countless hours getting the drug manufacturers to get those
guys out. There’s kind of a historical parallel here. They
must have felt like the Plumbers when they found out the
Cubans were in jail over Watergate. The question was how
to get them out. VHio's going to do it, will John Mitchell
do it? It was pure bribery, what they did with the drug
manufacturers. They raised almost SCO million from them,
and it was simply a matter of twisting arms.”

On December 29, 1962, exactly a week after the return

of the soldiers, President Kennedy and his wife flew to
Miami to welcome them back. Forty thousand Cubans — in-
cluding virtually all of JM WAVE’S Cuban agents— turned
out for the ceremonies in the Orange Bowl, and there was
a wild celebration of tears and shouts when the President
inspected the troops. The brigade members stood proudly
at attention even though several were still on crutches. In
a gesture of gratitude, one of the commanders gave Ken-
nedy the brigade’s flag for his safekeeping, and Kennedy
unfurled the flag as he stepped up to the microphone at the
fifty-yard line. “I want to express my great appreciation to
the brigade for making the United States the custodian of
this flag,” he said, in a voice rising with obvious emotion.

I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this bri-
gade in a free Havana.”

* Sheer bedlam reigned for a few minutes before Kennedy
could continue his speech: “Your conduct and valor are
proof that although Castro and his fellow' dictators may rule
nations, they do not rule people; that they may imprison
bodies, but they do not imprison spirits; that they may de-
stroy the exercise of liberty, but they cannot eliminate the
determination to be free.”

The Cubans were overjoyed. The President of the United
States had joined them not only with his presence and his
authority but also with his feelings. Within two months the
second and by far the most intense phase of the secret w f ar
against Castro had begun. Instead of calling previous Cuban
policies into question, the missile crisis seemed to provide

further justification for the conduct of the secret war. Hard-
ly anybody in Washington allowed for the possibility that
the secret war may have persuaded Castro to welcome Rus-
sian nuclear weapons in Cuba as a means of guaranteeing
his own survival. The lesson drawn was that Communist in-
fluence must be snuffed out quickly — preferably by covert
means — else dominoes fall and new threats of nuclear ex-
changes ensue.

American policy in this era came to resemble a terrible
Rube Goldberg machine fashioning ever more menacing
confrontations out of the humiliation of past defeats. It is
impossible to know to what extent the secret war, with its
hundreds of American case officers and its thousands of
Cuban agents, shaped succeeding events. But the men who
directed the war and the tactics they employed were to be
seen encroaching on the news of the next ten years.

Ted Shackley, the station chief of JM WAVE, packed his
bags and took his aides with him to orchestrate a new secret
war in Laos and then to direct the underground aspects of
the war in Vietnam. Rip Robertson and his fellow’ para-
military cowboys also joined in the effort and helped run
the Phoenix program. And the CIA’s Cuban agents began
the confusing trek that would change them from trusted
government agents into common criminals. During the same
period the two Kennedys would be assassinated, and Pres-
ident Nixon, employing both the tactics and the veterans
of the secret war, would attempt a covert attack against the
American system itself. □

(Far further reflections, sec page 103. ) 63